Balloon festivals get quite large: there's one in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, which gets nine hundred balloons and a million spectators.
But this one is rather smaller; perhaps 15 balloons. Prescott Valley
is a smallish country town, not far from the larger township of
Prescott. Every year for the past few, they've held a festival in which
a whole bunch of different things go on: a fair, a parade, a marathon,
an air show, and the balloon festival.

It's always the case, on any given outing, that there will be either too
many or too few crew. This time, it's way too many. I signed on
fairly early in the process, when our pilot, Dave, was struggling to find
crew; but crew have subsequently appeared from every available
crevice, and now we've got about eleven crew, plus pilot. I've travelled
down with Heather, April and Jeff (which, against all probability, is
short for "Jennifer"). I'm rooming with Dave and his wife Kristen, and
Frank. Frank has been on Dave's crew pretty much forever, and if
Dave had given anybody the title of crew chief, Frank would be it. He
is also Tarp Guy: if you want the tarpaulins rolled neatly, Frank's
your man.

Also on the crew is Dana, another regular, who has her significant other in
tow; four of Kristen's relatives and in-laws; and a local named Diane.
Having a local on your crew is a Good Thing: they know the weather
and the roads.

Dave usually tows the balloon around in a trailer behind his truck
(which in Australia would be called a ute), but for this longer trip he's
loaded it directly into the truck bed. It's rather a squeeze; with
everything packed as tightly as possible, it doesn't quite fit, so the
truck's tail gate is down, and everything is held in place
with numerous straps.

We're staying at the official hotel, and it's easy to know that you're in
the right place, because there are numerous trucks with balloons in
the back scattered around the parking lot. We get together in Dave's
room, and plot out the next morning's movements: basically, we are
all going to meet on the field at a particular time in the morning and
take it from there.

Then we go to dinner, which given the number of people involved is
nearly as complicated.

After dinner, we crash, in anticipation of tomorrow's early start. I'm
sleeping right next to Frank, which is something of an experience.
He has a diverse repertoire of snores, one of which is particularly
unusual. There's a tiny sort of whickering noise that the pilot flame
on the burner makes when you move into a layer of air that is moving
in a different direction, thus causing a slight breeze across the flame;
and you become attuned to this noise, because it tells you that
you're about to start moving in a new direction. Frank's special snore
sounds just like this, and so whenever he makes this particular
noise, I'm suddenly wide awake, thinking, "Wind's changing!"

We all make it to the field. There is some fairly heavy competition for
spots, as there are more balloons than there is space -- laying a
balloon out takes a lot of ground. We get a good space for Dave's
truck, and the rest of the crew vehicles get parked in the lot at the
end of the field. We then participate in the traditional early morning
stand-around-and-watch-the-weather. Various people put up pibals
(toy helium balloons), and we watch them float away. There's a
pilot's briefing, in which the event organisers read out the weather
forecast that they've just gotten from the nearest airport. (Cautious
pilots have already called up for their own forecasts.)

Everything seems to be go, so we lay out our balloon. But we don't
inflate.

This morning's event is a hare-and-hound race. Racing balloons
seems a bit odd at first, since they all share the same wind and will
therefore move at the same speed. But balloonists have figured
ways around this, and have a number of race-like games they play.
Today's, the hare and hound, involves one balloon taking off, flying for
a while, and landing, and everyone else trying to get as close as
possible to that spot. Because of the crowding that would result,
you don't actually land where the hare landed; you just drop a
bean-bag as you pass over. Except that the organisers don't have enough
bean-bags for everyone, so pilots who miss out are told to simply
drop a piece of equipment; a glove or something. One of the rules of
the hare and hound is that nobody is allowed to start cold-filling their
balloons until the hare has left the ground; this gives him a head-start.

The hare takes off and drifts away to the south-east, and a dozen
petrol-powered cold-fill fans start up all over the field. Our balloon, Sparky, gets
away near the start of the pack. On board are Dave; two of Kristen's
relatives; and a local sponsor of the festival, who gets a free ride in
return for her sponsorship. The hare has dropped low; heading for a
ridge where he can get some valley wind, which will take him in a
different direction, thus forcing everyone else to follow him down to
try to catch the same wind.

We chat with Diane, the local, about what roads we should take to
get to where everyone appears to be headed, and we walk back to
our vehicle. Kristen will be driving Dave's truck. Heather will be
driving our chase vehicle, and I get to sit in the front passenger seat,
as I will be navigating and communicating on the radio. There's one
other balloon and crew on our frequency this morning: the local
Remax ballon. (Remax are a real estate agency whose logo is a
hot-air balloon, and thus are in the habit of sponsoring balloons to carry
their name.)

Just as we get to the car, the radio springs to life:

Kristen: Sparky, this is chase one.

(pause)

Kristen: Sparky, chase one.

(Our radios are low power, and when we don't have direct line of sight
on the balloon, are quite short range. Sparky has already dropped
out of view.)

Nevertheless, it eventuates that Dave has had the foresight to place a
spare key in a magnetic box stuck inside the bumper. They
accordingly find these, and are able to follow. By this time they are
considerably behind us.

We have driven south to the highway, and have followed it east
around the ridge. The wind has picked up incredibly, and we are
watching balloons appear over the ridge and storm overhead at a
speed easily twice as fast as I have ever seen a hot air balloon
moving before. Dave later estimates the speed at over 20 knots (over
35 km/h). Most of the balloons, by the time they reach us, are
directly over the highway and are therefore unable to land, and so
they fly onwards. But Dave is a little further south, and is over a field.
Unbeknownst to us, he has already tried to land once, and failed,
the wind giving enough lift to carry him back into the air even though
he let heat out of the balloon. He is much too busy to talk to us, so
we only realise that he is going to attempt a landing in this field when
we see him start to dip towards it. We pile back into the vehicle, and
Heather floors it. We get to the side road ahead, which will get us as
close as we're going to get to the field, and we are confronted by
about four vehicles, all moving at a crawl, as their drivers all watch
the spectacle of a balloon hitting the field at a flat sprint. None of
them are watching us.

"Hit the horn", I say, and she does, and we roar toward the field, the
engine doing five thousand rpm in first gear.

There is no hole visible in the fence. I, long legged, leap out, run to
the fence and scissor-kick over it; while the rest drive on looking for a
way in. The balloon will require a huge number of crew to hold it
upright and steady in this wind.

But it's already over. Dave hauled the top out of the balloon while it
was still twenty feet in the air, and by the time I reach it, it is lying
flat, amidst the cow pats and cacti. We usually stop the balloon, lay
out the tarpaulins, and then drop it, but not today: visibly running out
of field, Dave just got down onto the ground as quickly as he could. I
pace out the drag marks left by the basket: over 30 metres (100
feet). The rest of the crew from our chase vehicle turn up, except
Heather, and we get the envelope tidied up into a long narrow bundle,
to reduce its wind profile. April points out that Dave has managed to
miss a particularly juicy cow pat by just a few centimetres.

Two of the passengers, Kristen's relatives, suffered somewhat during
the flight: one fainted, and one gashed her leg on a fuel tank during
the first attempted landing. The sponsor however, gives every sign of
having greatly enjoyed her flight.

The other chase vehicle catches up, and so do some council workers
that Heather had managed to locate, to unlock the gate for us. We
get it all packed up, and return to the launch field. There are a
number of tales told: one balloonist has burned a panel of his balloon
due to high winds while he was inflating. Several more read the
winds right and chickened out: having inflated their balloons, they
pulled the top out again and simply didn't fly. The balloons that we
saw speeding overhead, however, had traveled on for some distance,
and then the wind had died. They had quiet, boring, safe, easy,
upright landings.

We do breakfast, and then return to the hotel to nap, in order to be
nice and awake for this evening's event.